EXCLUSIVE: The Tulip Frenzy Interview With 2017 Album Of The Year Winner (Tied): Wand

In addition to Kelley Stoltz agreeing to answer some questions to accompany his write-up as winner of Tulip Frenzy’s 2017 Album Of The Year (Tied) honors, co-winners Wand agreed to answer some questions. We are particularly grateful that Evan Burrows, who we have computer ranked as the World’s #1 Drummer, spoke for the band.

Congratulations on Plum being tied for Album of the Year on our annual Top 10 List. We think Plum is Wand’s best album by far, and having seen the band in 2013, 2015, and this year at DC9, the new incarnation is a quantum leap forward. How do you think of Plum in terms of Wand’s progression?

Evan: Hey, thanks. I think we feel more or less that way too. Even since the first record, we’ve always talked about chasing a kind of feeling in the music that anything might be possible, that the next step could lead in any direction. We want the music to feel like it’s living and lived in, like it will respond to anything that touches it– flooded with new color and feeling, changing shape, shifting its posture and gait. I think Plum is the most sensitized and detailed music we’ve ever made, and I think it has thrown open more doors in our process than any record we’ve ever recorded. As we’ve started jamming for the next record, I feel like Plum is still whistling at us from last year’s autumn, reminding us to say ‘yes’ and to welcome new impulses when they enter the room.

We have all grown so much as musicians and people since the band started four years ago, and adding two more amazing musicians (nay humans) to the band this time around obviously transformed the organism. I think we’re finally making music that no one of us could account for in total, and the recordings are a lot more exciting as a result– the feels and spaces are deeper, more habitable, and they reveal more over time. We pay a lot more attention now to how we all play together, and what that does to a tune. These are still sculpted little pop songs, it’s still plain old rock music, but now it has five whole senses of invention animating it at once.

Even as we love both songs, it seems like it’s a far journey, musically and lyrically, to go from, say, “Reaper Invert” to “Charles De Gaulle.” We’ve read that several of the songs were culled from sessions where the band jammed and explored territory together. Did Cory come in with songs, or was it more of a group effort this time, working in a rehearsal space or studio?

Evan: Most of the song ideas on Plum were harvested from files and files of iPhone-recorded, unstructured jamming that we did at a clip in the late summer/autumn of 2016. We would listen back to those recordings and pick out promising ideas and return to them over and over in the practice space– stretching and prodding and expanding them, jamming short sections on loop, arranging and orchestrating things and arguing about structure and method and completely exhausting ourselves until it would suddenly feel good again. Then we’d know we had a song. We’d let this go on for like 6-10 hours a day including breaks for meals. There were so many minor versions. It got very obsessive.

The two songs on Plum that were exceptions to that process are “The Trap” (which we barely played until an hour or so before tracking it) and “Driving.” Cory brought those to the rest of the band as acoustic demos with rhythm guitar and vocals. Then we all contributed our own parts and worked on the arrangements together.

From the moment we heard “Blue Cloud,” we knew Plum would be a very different Wand album. Tell us about the impact Marquis Moon and a two-guitar band like Television had on this album.

Evan: Well, we all love Marquee Moon and I think Television is a band that has been really inspiring and instructive for us in many ways. Cory and Lee and I were listening to that record a ton when we were working on 1,000 Days. That band is so good– the economy of what they do, their discipline, the insistence of their four individual musical personalities and the sense of intimacy and chemistry between them. The beginning of “Blue Cloud” is an obvious nod, as is the way we let that song expand from a pretty simple premise into something totally excessive that joyously wanders away just to arrive back at home.

You, (singer/guitarist) Cory, and (bass player) Lee have worked together for some years. What impact did adding Sofia and Robert have on creating Plum?

Evan: Of course it had a profound impact, both on the music we make and on the living dynamic in the band. It’s hard to be precise about what that impact was because it has caused so much new movement. The music probably says it all– just give the record a couple more spins and focus on what each of them are up to the whole time. It blows my little mind.

Between 1000 Days and Plum, Cory produced a solo album and you both went out on the road as part of Ty Segall’s Muggers. Will you keep focused principally on Wand in 2018, or are there other projects in mind?

Evan: All three of us have been working on other projects or playing in other bands the whole time we’ve been playing together as Wand. Cory is always working on solo material, I write with another band called Behavior, Lee has a solo project called Oil Thief, Sofia is in another band called P22, Robbie just finished mixing a record he’s had in the can for a couple years… We all like to keep busy. I don’t think that will change in 2018, but we will also be writing, recording and touring together a lot next year. See you at the gig!